Final Fantasy Isn’t Dying. It’s Already Dead

The new face of Final Fantasy. Uh, you are looking at her face, right? Image: Square Enix

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but I think I’m gonna call it: Final Fantasy is dead.

It’s hard to pinpoint an exact time of death on this one, but at some point during the last decade the world’s foremost Japanese role-playing game series keeled over and kicked the bucket, and now Square Enix is pretty much just defiling the corpse. Here’s an excerpt from a question-and-answer session on July 27 with Nobuhiro Goto and Motomu Toriyama, developers of the next game in the series, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII.

Q: Has [main character] Lightning gone from a C cup to a D cup?

Goto: Well, Toriyama-san said he wanted them bigger, so…

Toriyama: Hey, don’t try to escape responsibility for this!

Goto: Yes, we made them bigger.

Q. Was it a C cup, up until now? Are her breasts going to jiggle, this time?

Goto: Yes!

Toriyama: It depends on the clothing. Like if she’s wearing corrective underwear.

Dengeki Online’s report of the event noted further that since players can choose Lightning’s costume and weaponry, they can ensure their preferred amount and duration of boob jiggling through judicious equipment selection. If you want to get a better view of all those mammarial undulations, one developer noted, just have her hold a smaller shield!

Hey, I’m the last person who’s going to tell people what kinds of videogames they should and should not make. I like Leisure Suit Larry, and that game is 95 percent jokes about and/or pictures of breasts. There is room to create and play a whole wide variety of things. But if in 2013 this is what a Q&A session about Final Fantasy has become, then any claim that the series once had something approaching mainstream respectability done gone and caught the train out of town.

In its heyday, Final Fantasy was the ne plus ultra of console videogames based around strong, relatable characters and epic storylines. Sure, the games had their moments of levity, but mostly took themselves seriously enough to attempt to tackle subtle, complex themes on platforms that were largely dominated by paper-thin plots and cartoon characters. They pushed the boundaries, if imperfectly; despite what I may have believed in high school the writing was not exactly Shakespeare. But the ideas of orchestras playing the games’ amazing musical scores or of art galleries displaying the design work of Yoshitaka Amano were not out of the question. And surely today’s game designers, the people making games like BioShock Infinite or The Last of Us, were inspired in part by early Final Fantasy.

What inspiration, if any, will breast-jiggling simulator Lightning Returns pass down to a new generation of game creators? Somewhere along the line, Final Fantasy lost the plot. Original creator Hironobu Sakaguchi is long gone, and if he attempted to pass the torch to a new generation they dropped it, let it go out in the dirt and kept running anyway. The 2001 game Final Fantasy X wasn’t that bad, but the next game after that, the awkwardly-named Final Fantasy X-2, decided that what the series needed was to take all the female player characters, give them skimpier outfits and make them into J-pop stars.

And it was pretty much all downhill from there. The Final Fantasy hydra has many heads, and it’s not just the console games that are continuing the legacy of the series. But everywhere you look, it’s bad news. The original version of the Final Fantasy XIV massively multiplayer online game was so poorly received by fans that Square Enix shut it down and rebuilt it from the ground up, at what had to be an exorbitant expense. And once the new version comes out, even if it’s good, it’s still going to be an MMO with a monthly fee in an era dominated by the free-to-play model. On mobile platforms we’re getting games like Final Fantasy: All the Bravest, critically excoriated as a naked gameplay-free cash grab.

Cash cows don’t last forever. The declining sales of Final Fantasy games, following the utter mess that was Final Fantasy XIII, should indicate that. At this point, it’s tough to see a path back to relevance for Final Fantasy, if the caretakers of the series are spending their creative cycles thinking about the particulars of breast physics. That’s not why the Final Fantasy brand still carries the cachet that it does, and the modern games are at this point living entirely off an inherited reputation.